Search Results for: fiction

How Apple’s Transcendent Chihuahua Killed the Revolution

Wreckage of the Zeppelin LZ4 after the crash in Echterdingen. Photo: Wikipedia Commons

Ian Bogost | from The Geek’s Chihuahua | University of Minnesota Press | April 2015 | 22 minutes (5,539 words)

 

The following is an excerpt from Ian Bogost’s book The Geek’s Chihuahua, which addresses “the modern love affair of ‘living with Apple’ during the height of the company’s market influence and technology dominance,” and how smartphones created a phenomenon of “hyperemployment.”

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Think back to 2007, when you got the first iPhone. (You did get one, didn’t you? Of course you did.) You don’t need me to remind you that it was a shiny object of impressive design, slick in hand and light in pocket. Its screen was bright and its many animations produced endless, silent “oohs” even as they became quickly familiar. Accelerometer-triggered rotations, cell tower triangulations (the first model didn’t have GPS yet), and seamless cellular/WiFi data transitions invoked strong levels of welcome magic. These were all novelties once, and not that long ago.

What you probably don’t remember: that first iPhone was also terrible. Practically unusable, really, for the ordinary barrage of phone calls, text messages, mobile email, and web browsing that earlier smartphones had made portable. And not for the reasons we feared before getting our hands on one—typing without tactile feedback wasn’t as hard to get used to as BlackBerry and Treo road warriors had feared, even if it still required a deliberate transition from t9 or mini-keyboard devices—but rather because the device software was pushing the limits of what affordable hardware could handle at the time.

Applications loaded incredibly slowly. Pulling up a number or composing an email by contact name was best begun before ordering a latte or watering a urinal to account for the ensuing delay. Cellular telephone reception was far inferior to other devices available at the time, and regaining a lost signal frequently required an antenna or power cycle. Wireless data reception was poor and slow, and the device’s ability to handle passing in and out of what coverage it might find was limited. Tasks interrupted by coverage losses, such as email sends in progress, frequently failed completely.

The software was barebones. There was no App Store in those early days, making the iPhone’s operating system a self-contained affair, a ladleful of Apple-apportioned software gruel, the same for everyone. That it worked at all was a miracle, but our expectations had been set high by decades of complex, adept desktop software. By comparison, the iPhone’s apps were barebones. The Mail application, for example, borrowed none of its desktop cousin’s elegant color-coded, threaded summary view but instead demanded inexplicable click-touches back and forward from folder to folder, mailbox to mailbox. Read more…

Troy James Weaver on Pleasure and Shame in Cross-Dressing as a Young Boy

So we were in the food court eating chili dogs and my dad was smoking his cigarettes and drinking a cup of coffee…Then, out of nowhere, my friend started blushing, eyes fixed to his plate, very clearly distraught, so my dad asked him: What’s the problem? And my friend, he said: That lady looks like an old man, pointing his finger. My dad couldn’t hold his laughter. He doubled over the newspaper he was staring at, and when he finished laughing, he patted my friend on his back and said: That lady looks like an old man because she is an old man. But of us were taken off guard. Why’d he dress like that? My dad laughed again…and whispered loudly: He’s a fairy. That’s what he’s into.

And then I wondered if that’s what I was into. I thought of all the times my older sister put makeup on me. I thought about all the times I’d ever played with Barbie dolls of my own free will. I thought about what my friends might think of me, if they knew I enjoyed it when my sister let me play with her girly toys. I wondered what it would be like to be a man dressed as a woman, especially in a world so clearly dominated by men who dressed like men.

–From Witchita Stories, a collection of autobiographical short fiction by Troy James Weaver about growing up in a small town with a junkie, convict brother.

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James Salter on Writing and the Open Road

INTERVIEWER

Does the travel help your writing?

SALTER

It’s essential for me. There is no situation like the open road, and seeing things completely afresh. I’m used to traveling. It’s not a question of meeting or seeing new faces particularly, or hearing new stories, but of looking at life in a different way. It’s the curtain coming up on another act.

I’m not the first person who feels that it’s the writer’s true occupation to travel. In a certain sense, a writer is an exile, an outsider, always reporting on things, and it is part of his life to keep on the move. Travel is natural. Furthermore, many men of ancient times died on the road, and the image is a strong one. Kings of Arabia, when they are buried, are not given great tombs. They are buried on the side of the road beneath ordinary stones. One thing I saw in England long ago struck me and has always stayed with me. I was going to visit someone in a little village, walking from the railway station across the fields, and I saw an old man, perhaps in his seventies, with a pack on his back. He looked to be a vagabond, dignified, somewhat threadbare, marching along with his staff. A dog trotted at his heels. It was an image I thought should be the final one of a life. Traveling on.

James Salter, in an interview with poet Edward Hirsch from The Paris Review. Hirsch interviewed Salter in late summer 1992 and the interview appeared in the Review’s Summer 1993 issue. Salter died June 19, 2015, at the age of 90.

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The Art and Business of Book Covers

When I moved out of my previous home, I donated more than three-fourths of my book collection because I was moving into a tiny space. I had no logical process for deciding which books I kept. Some were sentimental, with handwritten notes written inside; others were souvenirs I bought during my travels. These books seemed obvious to keep. Yet I was also inclined to keep hardcovers I’d never read or even opened, simply because the covers were attractive. All of these books, together, would represent my best self — the one I wanted to display on my shelves.

As I read more online, and since my physical shelf space has dramatically shrunk, I wonder: what makes an eye-catching, effective book cover? Which books will make the final cut?

Here are pieces I’ve enjoyed, new and old, about the art and business of book cover design.

1. “Judge This: The Power of First Impressions.” (Chip Kidd, Medium, June 2015)

In this excerpt from his new book, Judge This, Chip Kidd explains that balancing clarity and mystery is important in design, and shows how both elements informed the covers he designed for books by Oliver Sacks, Harry Kramer, Haruki Murakami, and David Sedaris.
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The Weirdness of Near-Future America

You, Little Sylvia, will come up knowing the truth, but to the rest of the world–to jellyfishes, crackers, finkies, and swells, to Bosom families and Consolidated alike–the stars are not real. The planets are not real. Astronomy, if spoken of al all, is regarded as a delusional cult scarcely more respectable than the Jesus Lovers. The Chiefs long back did the decent thing and decided to put both gangs out of business. The Jesus Lovers dug in; you will see their lowercase t scratched on fenceposts with a ten-dollar nail. But the Astronomers went off quietly without leaving a trace or sign.

They were easily dispatched because their ideas so nearly resembled fiction. You will learn better, Little Sylvia, but to the rest of the world Astronomy is nonsense, magic on par with weather-knowing and poetry cures.

The surest way to hobble any truth is to put it in a story-book. Smart Man Tolemy wrote The Lonesome Wanderer for children so that we would come up knowing Astronomy as a fairy tale. His Astronomers were pale, hairless mountain men who believed the bright flaws in the Night Glass to be distant Suns.  They believed the Wanderers to be other worlds like our own. In contradiction of common sense and observation, their Sun did not circle the Earth but the other way around.

–From Jeffrey Rotter’s second novel The Only Words That Are Worth Rememberinga chaotic romp following the much maligned Van Zandt family as they try escape the law in a near-future America, where astronomy has become a fairy tale, and Earth has returned to its pre-Copernican status as the center of the Universe.
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Limits, or How to Avoid the Precipice Between Courage and Humility

Photo by Gary Bremner

I need to tell you about the Cirque of the Unclimbables. Ever since I went there, I’ve tried to describe it to friends and family, tried to explain its power and its perfection. It is, I tell people, the best natural campsite I have ever visited. It’s also among the most beautiful eyefuls of landscape I’ve ever seen — its rock walls more overpowering than Zion’s, in Utah, its evening light more perfect than Hawaii’s, its peaks more menacing than Denali, and its stillness more complete than the deep rainforests of the Olympic Peninsula. It’s a place that forces me to reach for comparisons from fiction: It’s “Lord of the Rings,” I tell people. It’s Mordor crossed with the Shire.

Their friend had died while climbing, they said, and now here they were: climbing. They weren’t here because of his death, and they weren’t here despite it. They would continue to live their lives in the face of risk, just as he had lived his. But it was clear that the avalanche that had taken Cole’s life added another emotional layer to their journey, another bit of weight on their shoulders as they climbed.

In SBNation, writer Eva Holland explores what it means to comprehend and embrace your limits — to know yet avoid the precipice between courage and humility — on a climbing expedition to the Yukon Territories’ famed Cirque of the Unclimbables.

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Judy Blume, on the Age that Defined Her for Life

Blume does think that she turned toward children’s fiction because she was still living a relatively sheltered life. “I didn’t have any adult experience when I started to write,” she said. “So I identified more with kids.” Her own fate felt sealed, airless. “I felt, I made this decision. This is it. It’s not all open for me anymore.” To her, it was only natural that she look backward, to the age when she felt most powerful and adulthood still promised the adventures her father wanted for her. She had been a fierce and creative child; on the page, at least, she still was. Blume likes the idea that everybody has an age that defines them for life. For her, she said, that age is 12.

— From a profile of beloved author Judy Blume in The New York Times Magazine.

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A Woman on the Margins

Photo: Mitchell Bach

Jessica Gross | Longreads | May 2015 | 17 minutes (4,223 words)

 

I first encountered the work of the memoirist, critic, and journalist Vivian Gornick in graduate school when we were assigned The Situation and the Story, her handbook on personal writing. Gornick explains that the writer must create out of her real self a separate narrative persona. The narrator has wisdom and distance the writer may not, and can craft a meaningful story out of the raw details of life. This slim book cracked open my understanding of what it means to write.

In Fierce Attachments, her 1987 memoir, Gornick wields her narrative persona to construct an incisive, nuanced portrait of her conflicted bond with her mother. She describes the Bronx tenements where she grew up, the early death of her father, the complex relationship with their neighbor Nettie and, at the center of it all, a struggle with her codependent maternal bond. Her new memoir, The Odd Woman and the City, a collage of interactions in the New York City streets and with her longtime friend Leonard, is a meditation on friendship, her status as an “Odd Woman”—a second-wave feminist—and her place in urban life.

We met at a restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where Gornick was staying for spring break before she returned to the University of Iowa where she teaches at the nonfiction program. It was sleeting out, and Gornick asked me if her mascara was running, then ordered a mezzo plate and a glass of Sauvignon Blanc. She began by telling me how much she hates teaching.

Why do you teach so much?

I don’t do it often at all anymore. In this case, they offered me too much money, and I felt I couldn’t say no. But I was wrong: I should have said no.

Why is that?

I can’t live for four months in a place like Iowa City anymore. I’m really too old for that. I’m not even sure I do need the money, but you always feel you need the money. I always taught just to make a living, and I made myself a good teacher of writing; I certainly made myself a good editor. But this time around I saw that I am so deeply out of sympathy with the whole enterprise that it’s immoral for me to teach. Read more…

The Secret to Honesty in Writing

“It didn’t occur to me that my books would be widely read at all, and that enabled me to write anything I wanted to. And even once I realized that they were being read, I still wrote as if I were writing in secret.”

Author Louise Erdrich, in the Paris Review.

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The Almost-Real Science in ‘Orphan Black’

Photo: a olin

On television, women don’t usually play grownup human beings; they play slightly oversize children, helpless and pouty, driven by appetites they can’t possibly understand. At the show’s surfeit of interesting, adult females, the mind reels. That they are merely egg containers would seem boringly reductive, in a biology-is-destiny way, except that it’s such an interesting answer to science fiction’s big question: Who creates life? It could be said that “Orphan Black” is a feminist “Frankenstein,” if it weren’t true that “Frankenstein” was a feminist “Frankenstein” … One trick, in “Orphan Black,” is keeping the story ahead of the science; another is keeping the women ahead of the men.

— If you’re not watching “Orphan Black,” a BBC sci-fi drama about six? eight? twelve? clones, each played by the unbelievably talented Tatiana Maslany: start. Today, preferably. (The third season premiered earlier this month—two seasons won’t take long to binge-watch.) At the New Yorker, Jill Lepore draws parallels between the vaguely nefarious scientific undertakings on “Orphan Black” and the very real history of eugenics, germline editing, genome mapping and birth control. “Orphan Black” stands at the crossroads of feminist television—full of brilliant, distinct women who are, to cop another popular TV show’s theme, strong as hell—and controversial science.

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